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skyjake.fi

Pencil to Paper

📅 2024-09-06

The last time I wrote anything of significant length on actual paper with an actual pencil was 20 years ago, in university. My challenge here, now, is to see if I can still pull this off. Literally old-school.

In the spirit of ROOPHLOCH — slightly twisting the rules, perhaps — I'm sitting outside on the porch, with a pencil and a notepad. The pencil is one of those metallic ones where you can insert thin rods of graphite. I've owned this one since high school and it has served me well. "Pentel S445" it says on its side, and it has a matte silvery finish to the metal. I'm not a pen enthusiast, however, nor do I really work much with paper and pencil these days — I found this one lying around so I chose it for today's task.

The technique is coming back to me. I've always enjoyed drawing, and writing manually on paper is a form of drawing, I suppose. Compared to digital writing, this is certainly slower, more deliberate. You need to choose words with care, because editing is difficult, if possible at all. I find myself erasing and swapping words here and there, but on the whole, what has been written is there to stay.

Continuing still a bit on the meta level: I intend to post this by scanning the text on my phone and uploading it to my gemlog via Lagrange. Hopefully this works! At first, I considered writing on the iPad, but there is a certain off-putting slipperiness to writing with the Apple Pencil. The display of the iPad is just too smooth. You need that paper-pencil friction.

I can hear rustling in the bushes next to me. Must be a bird hopping about. Does this count as being "off-grid"? Later in the fall, the rabbits will be visiting the yard. I often see them munching on something as I have breakfast.

The old-fashioned writing gear makes me wonder about how reliant society is becoming on digital devices and the internet. Nowadays everything is online and you can't get anything done without a web browser. A person is not complete without their phone, severed from friends and family. Such a great amount of change in a couple of short decades! As I get older, it becomes easier to see where generational differences stem from. The world is ever-changing and each generation faces a new set of challenges. Now, I'm not much of a traditionalist, adopting the digital ways gladly, but I can certainly understand how society at large sees the next generation as compromised — doomed, even — as the old ways are abandoned and strange new behaviors emerge.

As I get older, my fondness for old tech has been growing. Perhaps this is the natural 30-year arc of nostalgia, a longing for the wonders of youth, but perhaps it is also increasingly a rejection of the immense complexity of modern technology. Every year, software grows heavier and slower, as we pile on abstractions and tack on more and more features. In contrast, old technology is refreshingly simple. I suspect this is relative to one's baseline experience, though. Someone fifty years in the future will likely judge our current state of the art as quaint and useless as we consider the gramophone today.

I've also gradually been falling off the upgrade cycle of always having the latest devices. The PC industry was growing and advancing so rapidly when I was young that it was unthinkable not to upgrade or switch computers every few years. This naturally transferred over to the yearly mobile phone upgrades in my 20s. Only now in my 40s I'm comfortable with the notion of using a three-year old phone as my daily driver. Of course, the pace of advancement has slowed so there is less psychological pressure to upgrade. I suppose with age one's priorities shift, too.

I think I'm quite enjoying this method of writing. This is how humans have been corresponding and making notes for hundreds of years. I feel a connection to the ancient ways.

Something black and small runs across the yard. It must be the bush-rustler from before.

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The scanning of the handwriting turned out to be a bit dodgy, requiring editing on the phone. Maybe a bolder pen would have helped. A few paragraphs were completely garbled, but it was actually fun to use voice dictation to type them in.

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